Creating Anna Karenina

by Bob Blaisdell

  “That’s it! that’s it!” he said, and, at once picking up the pencil, he began rapidly drawing. The spot of tallow had given the man a new pose.

  He had sketched this new pose, when all at once he recalled the face of a shopkeeper of whom he had bought cigars, a vigorous face with a prominent chin, and he sketched this very face, this chin on to the figure of the man. He laughed aloud with delight. The figure from a lifeless imagined thing had become living, and such that it could never be changed. That figure lived, and was clearly and unmistakably defined. The sketch might be corrected in accordance with the requirements of the figure, the legs, indeed, could and must be put differently, and the position of the left hand must be quite altered; the hair too might be thrown back. But in making these corrections he was not altering the figure but simply getting rid of what concealed the figure. He was, as it were, stripping off the wrappings which hindered it from being distinctly seen. Each new feature only brought out the whole figure in all its force and vigor, as it had suddenly come to him from the spot of tallow. He was carefully finishing the figure when the cards were brought him.

  “Coming, coming!”X

  One hopes that Tolstoy had such moments of excited, laughter-inducing discovery. (One wonders if he also was somehow put into the perfect fervor for writing after an argument with Sofia.) If he had such moments, they must have been few and far between, because no seems to have caught him at it.

  His sister-in-law Tatyana, in her pre-marriage days, had worshiped Tolstoy almost as much as Sofia had. In her memoirs she is as lively and attractive as the character Natasha Rostova that Tolstoy modeled on her. In the mid-1860s, during the writing of War and Peace, when Tolstoy was in Moscow getting treatment for his injured arm, Tatyana had helped him by taking dictation. She recalled:

  I see him as clearly as though he were here now—with a look of concentration on his face, supporting his injured arm with his other hand—walking back and forth, dictating to me. Ignoring me completely, he talked aloud: “No, a cliché won’t do,” or he simply said: “Strike that out.”

  His tone was commanding. There was impatience in his voice, and often while dictating he would change a passage some three or four times. Sometimes he dictated quietly, smoothly, as though dictating something he had memorized, but that rarely happened, and then the expression on his face would become calm. At other times he would dictate in spurts, unevenly and hurriedly. […]

  Our dictation usually finished with these words: “I’ve tortured you enough. Go skating now.”XI

  Writing, for Tolstoy, was a most serious labor.

  * * *

  On January 16, Strakhov wrote Tolstoy from Petersburg that “Even advanced teachers find that the descriptions of Seryozha include important points for the theory of education and learning.”XII Strakhov, bless his heart, was referring to the end of Part 5, when Seryozha is on the eve of his ninth birthday (these are scenes I skipped over in the summary in the previous chapter in order to discuss them now):

  … when the teacher came, the lesson about the adverbs of place and time and manner of action was not ready, and the teacher was not only displeased, but hurt. This touched Seryozha.XIII

  Later in 1877, when Tolstoy had just finished correcting the first complete edition of Anna Karenina, he told a young man that he noticed “a story makes an impression only when it’s impossible to sort out with whom the author sympathizes.”XIV But if we look at any scene that Tolstoy wrote involving teachers and students, it’s always the students who have all of Tolstoy’s and our sympathy. Tolstoy brings out our sympathy for Seryozha here because we see where Seryozha’s sympathy is going—toward his understandably impatient teacher. Simultaneously, Tolstoy shows us Seryozha’s all too familiar childhood confusion:

  He felt he was not to blame for not having learned the lesson; however much he tried, he was utterly unable to do that. As long as the teacher was explaining to him, he believed him and seemed to comprehend, but as soon as he was left alone, he was positively unable to recollect and to understand that the short and familiar word “suddenly” is an adverb of manner of action. Still he was sorry that he had disappointed the teacher.XV

  Tolstoy has put us so deeply and sympathetically into Seryozha’s frame of mind and feelings that it was only a few years ago that I realized that while once upon a time I had been in Seryozha’s situation, I was actually by profession and habit the kvetching tutor. Tolstoy has tricked us: All of us sympathize with Seryozha even though all of us grown-ups—Strakhov and Tolstoy included—are most of the time the brow-beating teacher. Strakhov, who pointed out this scene, had been a teacher and was still a consultant about national education issues. From these scenes about Seryozha and his teacher, Strakhov and his fellow pedagogues gained an ability to imagine students intently thinking their own thoughts:

  He chose a moment when the teacher was looking in silence at the book.

  “Mihail Ivanitch, when is your birthday?” he asked all, of a sudden.

  “You’d much better be thinking about your work. Birthdays are of no importance to a rational being. It’s a day like any other on which one has to do one’s work.”XVI

  Not one of the millions of readers of this scene has ever sympathized with the exasperated teacher, Mikhail Ivanovich. (And yet after we teachers close the book, the next time we walk into our classrooms we reorient ourselves into Mikhail Ivanoviches!)

  Tolstoy makes us identify with Seryozha’s engaged attention, not with the deadened spirit of Mikhail Ivanovich, for whom it’s just another moment in the frustrating life of a teacher:

  Seryozha looked intently at the teacher, at his scanty beard, at his spectacles, which had slipped down below the ridge on his nose, and fell into so deep a reverie that he heard nothing of what the teacher was explaining to him. He knew that the teacher did not think what he said; he felt it from the tone in which it was said. “But why have they all agreed to speak just in the same manner always the dreariest and most useless stuff? Why does he keep me off; why doesn’t he love me?” he asked himself mournfully, and could not think of an answer.XVII

  The earnest boy is alive in spirit in this moment and the teacher is not. This was as much a revelation to the fiction-writing Tolstoy as it is to us. As a father, Tolstoy could as senselessly badger his own children when teaching them math as Mikhail Ivanovich does to his charge here.

  Speaking of fathers, Seryozha sits with his father for the next lesson of the morning.Karenin goes into teacher/father-mode. As soon as that happens…

  Seryozha’s eyes, that had been shining with gaiety and tenderness, grew dull and dropped before his father’s gaze. This was the same long-familiar tone his father always took with him, and Seryozha had learned by now to fall in with it. His father always talked to him—so Seryozha felt—as though he were addressing some boy of his own imagination, one of those boys that exist in books, utterly unlike himself.XVIII

  That’s on those of us who are teachers or parents—speaking to our children as though they are or should be the ones that we fantasized we deserved:

  And Seryozha always tried with his father to act being the storybook boy.XIX

  Someone could argue that students should pretend to be those imaginary students—because then they might learn something. Just act the part, and you’ll be the part. But even if you argue that, you can’t argue with this moment in the novel. We sympathize only with Seryozha. Nobody can be on Karenin’s side.

  To rebut Tolstoy with his own words: it’s impossible to not “sort out with whom the author sympathizes.”

  As the scene goes on, Seryozha gets confused and Karenin becomes annoyed. Tolstoy puts us again into Seryozha’s heart and head:

  The passage at which he was utterly unable to say anything, and began fidgeting and cutting the table and swinging his chair, was where he had to repeat the patriarchs before the Flood. He did not know one of them, except Enoch, who had been taken up alive to heaven. Last time he had remembered their names, b
ut now he had forgotten them utterly, chiefly because Enoch was the personage he liked best in the whole of the Old Testament, and Enoch’s translation to heaven was connected in his mind with a whole long train of thought, in which he became absorbed now while he gazed with fascinated eyes at his father’s watch-chain and a half-unbuttoned button on his waistcoat.XX

  Even dull Karenin, if he knew what was going on in Seryozha’s head, would be touched and would lay off. He loves his son; he would not torture him as he is unconsciously doing now. That “whole long train of thought” of Seryozha’s is something that Tolstoy honors and reveals in almost all his characters:

  In death, of which they talked to him so often, Seryozha disbelieved entirely. He did not believe that those he loved could die, above all that he himself would die.XXI

  What do we rereaders of the novel know here? That tomorrow Seryozha is going to see his mother, who he has been told is dead (by horrid Lidia Ivanovna and his father). We also know that Seryozha in a couple of years will indeed believe in death.

  In Seryozha’s “whole long train of thought,” death “seemed completely impossible and incomprehensible to him”:

  But he had been told that all men die; he had asked people, indeed, whom he trusted, and they too, had confirmed it; his old nurse, too, said the same, though reluctantly. But Enoch had not died, and so it followed that everyone did not die. “And why cannot anyone else so serve God and be taken alive to heaven?” thought Seryozha. Bad people, that is those Seryozha did not like, they might die, but the good might all be like Enoch.XXII

  Tolstoy shows us that in the midst of such a profound meditation as Seryozha’s, dull-witted grown-ups are trying to teach him.

  “Well, what are the names of the patriarchs?”

  “Enoch, Enos—”

  “But you have said that already. This is bad, Seryozha, very bad. If you don’t try to learn what is more necessary than anything for a Christian,” said his father, getting up, “whatever can interest you? I am displeased with you, and Piotr Ignatitch” (this was the most important of his teachers) “is displeased with you.… I shall have to punish you.”

  His father and his teacher were both displeased with Seryozha, and he certainly did learn his lessons very badly.XXIII

  Again, if Karenin only knew. Yet we teachers do know better and make the same mistake: We scold our students in the midst of their actual educational experience. We scold them for sliding into their own feelings and thoughts and not reciting thoughtless unfelt words back at us.

  Unless we can imagine our own stirred-up Seryozhas thinking of Enoch and death and their beloved mothers, we aren’t likely to hold ourselves back: we will continue to berate and distract the students for their own damned good!

  So I obtrusively pin a moral on this extraordinary piece of art.

  The most important thing to remember here about Seryozha is that he’s Anna’s boy. He’s dreaming of seeing her on his birthday tomorrow and we know that he will. And what of those heartbreaking chapters when Anna, despite Lidia and Karenin forbidding her to do so, has come to the house to see Seryozha on his birthday?

  I summarized them above, but just go read them! They’re too fine for my blunt summarizing. Copying out Chapters 29 and 30 of Part 5 made Sofia cry, and even if you’re an old stick like Karenin, they’ll make you cry, too.

  * * *

  Let’s return to Sofia and her trip to Petersburg on January 14. At the train in Moscow, Sofia was introduced to Katkov, the Russian Herald’s editor, by her uncle Kostya, and rode with him from Moscow.XXIV

  It seems hard not to think of Anna riding on the train when there Sofia was, on her own with her little brother Stepan, but Katkov, almost sixty years old, the father of eleven, famous in his own right, was no lovestruck Vronsky; he was deferential and polite and looked for her in her carriage in the morning to ask how she had slept and if she needed anything.

  In St. Petersburg Sofia saw Dr. Botkin, and on January 16, she wrote her husband that Botkin was “very attentive. He said that my lungs and chest are perfectly healthy, that it’s all nerves. He made a prescription, diet advice, changes and so on. I asked him, ‘Could it be I’m well?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re not at all well,’ and kept telling me to stay a week, in order to begin the treatment with him.”XXV

  Botkin told her she could and should have more children (her previous doctor had warned her against doing so). “Lev Nikolaevich was thrilled at this advice,”XXVI Sofia noted, as she apparently was not:

  But no matter how spoilt or celebrated I was in Petersburg, all my thoughts, interests and attachments at this time were back with my own family at Yasnaya Polyana. I kept receiving letters from Lev Nikolaevich describing all the details about himself and the family.XXVII

  When we read “kept receiving” we might imagine that Tolstoy wrote her at least once a day during that week. There are only three letters, however, that have survived (or even seem to have existed), but what a good first letter he wrote on January 14 or 15:

  Yesterday after you left we went skating—D’yakov and I. The children were good and jolly, except Ilyusha, whose face, it struck me from morning, was disgusting. The whole day I was in a dark mood—and unhealthy, as my thoughts about Ilyusha tormented me. I’m embarrassed to say about D’yakov, whom I so love, that I got tired of him. No working. At night, having put the children to bed, I went to bring D’yakov to Kozlovka. I returned—played a while and depressed lay down to sleep. I slept poorly and woke early. I went around the children. They’re all well and conducting themselves well. I, in order to right myself, went riding until coffee, did gymnastics and went skating with the children.

  Everyone ran around merrily. The day was frosty, but the sun warms well. Yesterday I allowed them, except Seryozha, to spend an extra hour; but today, afraid of your precision, went with them home in time. Everyone did their lessons. Ilyusha with Vl[adimir] Ivanovich. This moment, after a long wavering, I decided to speak again with Ilyusha. He cried and I cried, and, God willing, ended the consequences.

  I can’t do anything else today and I’m going to Yasenka bringing this letter.

  Please don’t hurry back. If only for the need of Botkin’s advice, and simply if it’s pleasant to you to be with good people. It’s not worth hurrying when you have gone so far away. Please don’t do that, or you’ll tell me: “I would’ve gone, seen or heard this if I had spent another day.” I’m lonely without you, but there’s not that misery I’m afraid of, and I feel there won’t be. And the children are in such conditions as with you. Goodbye, darling. Kiss everyone you love for me.XXVIII

  No 19th-century husband left at home with the children could have written a more considerate, informative letter.

  He wrote again, even more feelingly, on January 16: “As you see, we continue being all right.” Their daughter Tanya prefaced his letter: “We’re all well, I’m beginning because I know you’re worried about us.” Having Tanya lead off, he could more comfortably and reassuringly tell Sofia:

  Yesterday I taught Lele and Tanya, and Tanya got me so angry I yelled at her, and I feel very ashamed. I can’t work. Last night the children sat with me and painted, and I played draughts with Vladimir Ivanovich, but then played the piano the whole night, until one. For a long time I couldn’t sleep and woke up early. Right now I’m going to the station. The children went skating, but today there was a strong frost; at night it was 19 degrees, but in the sun it was warm.

  It’s so boring for me, the meals with pedagogues sulking at each other. I every moment think about you and imagine what you’re doing. And, it seems to me, despite being gloomy (from my stomach), all will be well.

  Please don’t hurry, and even though you say you won’t buy anything, don’t feel shy about the money, and if you decide to buy something, get the money from Lyubov Aleksandrovna [Sofia’s mother] and buy, and go on a binge!—And within three days we’ll return it.

  Farewell, darling, I haven’t yet received the letter from you. W
ithout you I try not to think about you. Yesterday I went over to your desk, and I jumped up and down (as though I had touched something hot) trying not to picture you in my mind’s eye. The same at night—I don’t look in the direction of your {bed}. [I’ve italicized Cathy Porter’s translation of Sofia’s excerpt in My Life, which is more explanatory than what I had translated for myself.] If you would only be in a strong, energetic spirit in the time of your stay, then all will be well.

  A bow from me to all, especially Lyubov Aleksandrovna.

  Tanya added another note: “Today we skated—little, because it was freezing. Lele was such a long time getting his skates on, and when he made a circle we saw that he was crying. We asked him about what, and he said, “I’m cold every where.” [This phrase was set down in English by Tanya.] Annie [Phillips, the English governess] right away ran home with him and rubbed his arms and legs with eau de cologne and put a coat on him. Now he’s completely warmed up.”XXIX

  Sofia quoted from only one of Tolstoy’s three letters. Let’s start with her excerpts to see what she wanted to emphasize:

  He wrote:

  “Yesterday I taught Lelja and Tanja, and Tanja got me so angry I yelled at her, and I feel very ashamed.” He also wrote about playing board-games with the children and draughts with the teacher, Vladimir Ivanovich {Rozhdestvenkij}.

  He was very affectionate toward me {in his letters}. For example, he wrote me:

  “… I played the piano the whole evening until one in the morning… I try not to think about you. Yesterday I went over to your desk, and I jumped up and down (as though I had touched something hot) trying not to picture you in my mind’s eye. The same at night—I don’t look in the direction of your {bed}.”XXX